Creating Advanced Charts - Excel Tutorial
Graphics, images, and charts are great ways to visualize and represent the data,
and Excel does exactly same thing for us by automatically creating the charts. There
may be times when we would like to go beyond the basic charts that excel creates
for us. This article will focus on that.
What is an advanced chart?
An advanced chart is a chart that goes beyond the basic charts created by Excel.
Let's say you have more than one set of data that you would like to compare on the
same chart, you can create your basic chart with one set of data then add more
datasets to it and apply other items i.e. formatting to the chart. This is what
advanced charts are all about.
The importance of advanced charts
They provide consolidated information in a single chart that makes it easier to
compare more than one data set and make decisions quickly
They allow us to customize the look and feel of the charts
Step by step example of creating advanced charts
In this tutorial exercise, we will assume that we run a blog and have software that
gives us the number of monthly visitors. We would like to see the relationship
between the numbers of articles published per month vs the total month traffic. We
will work with the following data set.
Month Articles Published Site Visitors
Jan 20 120
Feb 16 145
Mar 19 130
Apr 25 200
Jun 20 230
Jul 13 221
Create a new workbook in Excel
Enter the data shown above
Create a basic column chart as shown below. If you do not know how to
create a basic chart, then read the article on charts.
It's now time to take our charts beyond the basics. Select the orange bars
representing traffic
Click on change chart type as shown below
You will get the following dialog window
1. Select Combo
2. Click on the clustered column
3. Select Line chart
4. Click on OK button
Congratulations, you just created a chart with two types of charts in it.
Let's now add a secondary axis to our chart to make it look more presentable.
Select the chart
Click on Design under chart tools and select change chart type
1. Click on Secondary Axis check box under Site Visitors
2. Click on OK button
Let's now edit the chart, primary and secondary axis titles as shown below.
1. Go to Add chart elements
2. Click on Axis titles
3. Select primary verticals
4. Double click on the chart title and edit the title
Write Monthly Published Articles vs Site Traffic. Your complete chart should now
look as follows
As you can see from the above complete chart, we have consolidated two data sets
and visualized them in such a way that it easily shows the effect of one data set onto
the other.
Download the above Excel Code
Summary
Advanced charts are a great way of consolidating more than one data set and
visualizing them to identity patterns, etc.